The Counterlife - Hardcover

Roth, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374130264 ISBN 13: 9780374130268

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987

Synopsis

This radical work, whose protagonist is the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, ranges from a Christmas Carol service in London's West End to a Sabbath evening celebration in Israel's occupied West Bank. It suceeds in evoking both the nationalist militancy within modern Israel and the coded but palpable manifestations of anti-Semitism in establishment England.

About this title

Review:

The saga of Henry and Nathan Zuckerman continues, 13 years after novelist Nathan Zuckerman first appeared in Roth's 1974 effort, My Life as a Man. In The Counterlife, the dentist Henry suffers an unsettling--and for Roth, a predictable--side effect to his heart medication: impotence, which leads him to undergo an ill-fated operation. The multi-layered plot line travels from New York to London to Israel, while the characters undergo a series of surprising transformations. In the words of Nathan, a change in one's life causes "a counterlife that is one's own anti-myth." It's vintage Roth.

From the Inside Flap:

The Counterlife is about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Wherever they may find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate.
Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through the book's evocative landscapes, familiar and foreign, is the miind of the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. His is the skeptical, enveloping intelligence that calculates the price that's paid in the struggle to change personal fortune and reshape history, whether in a dentist's office in suburban New Jersey, or in a tradition-bound English Village in Gloucestershire, or in a church in London's West End, or in a tiny desert settlement in Israel's occupied West Bank.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0374130264
• ISBN 13: 9780374130268
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336